Michel Gondry
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Watch: Michel and Oliver Gondry’s Music Video for “Model Village,” by IDLES
Director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and brother Olivier, who previously worked together on music videos like the Chemical Brothers’s “Star Guitar,” have just released a new quarantine-made clip for the Bristol band IDLES. Using a blend of lo-fi animation (Michel’s cardboard cutouts shot by a suspended-overhead iPhone) and CGI (Olivier’s desktop wizardry), the clip, which suggests a Richard Scarry adaptation of Animal Farm, moves from a racist village to the moon. From an article on the video at WePresent: The song is really about the dangerous small-mindedness born out of villages which can sometimes act as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2020 -
Watch: Michel Gondry’s Charming, iPhone-Shot Summer Vacation Short, Detour
Michel Gondry has made a charming and inventive — in his typically lo-fi way — short film for Apple that shows off the video capabilities of the iPhone 7. With elements of The Red Balloon, Toy Story and, I’m sure, memories Gondry has revisited from his own childhood family vacations in France, the short follows a family on their annual summer sojourn, a trip that winds up leaving the youngest child’s prized red tricycle along the side of the road. Impressively, the short doesn’t try to fake some kind of crazy bokeh, or indulge in trick macro shots. No, like […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 29, 2017 -
Watch: Michel Gondry Directs The White Stripes’ City Lights Video
Filmmaker Michel Gondry recently surprised The White Stripes with the simple, but mesmerizing (above) video for “City Lights.” “On his own and without anyone’s knowledge, the legendary filmmaker shot a video for ‘City Lights,’ which he sent them the other night,” according to Third Man Records. The video marks Gondry’s fifth visual collaboration with The White Stripes.
by Paula Bernstein on Sep 12, 2016 -
Michel Gondry’s Low-Budget Taxi Driver Remake
Swede: to remake a film with limited resources, cheap effects and obsolete technology, as per Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. The idiosyncratic Frenchman put his own concept to the test with his low-budget re-imagining of Taxi Driver. Upon watching the short, screenwriter Paul Schrader had this much to say: “I always maintained Taxi Driver should never [have a] sequel or [be] remade. Michel Gondry is making me rethink this position.” With Schrader recently dismissing talk of a Lars Von Trier Taxi Driver remake, now is the time to revisit Gondry’s version.
by Sarah Salovaara on Feb 19, 2014 -
Pickups for Gondry’s Mood Indigo, Berninger’s Mistaken for Strangers and Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces
In a busy Monday for acquisitions, Michel Gondry’s romance Mood Indigo, Tom Berninger’s doc on The National, Mistaken for Strangers, and Daniel Patrick Carbone’s indie favorite Hide Your Smiling Faces all found homes with theatrical distributors. Drafthouse Films snapped up Indigo, which stars Audrey Tatou and Romain Duris and has a certain Amelie vibe to it. The film premiered at Karlovy Vary last year rather than one of the big fall fests, so it’s maybe not surprising that an emerging distributor like Drafthouse has picked up the film rather than a bigger and more established outfits. Drafthouse boss Tim League said of the purchase, “Not since Amelie have […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 13, 2014 -
Inside Michel Gondry’s Home Studio
Fans of Michel Gondry and his latest Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? may enjoy this peak inside his home studio, courtesy of The Creators Project. From his cluttered Brooklyn brownstone, Gondry demonstrates his hand-drawn animation technique with Sharpies and a 16mm Arriflex, which allow him to create “a texture that [he] feels is cinematic.” It is a rather time-consuming, detail-oriented trade that Gondry admits to wielding during his casting courtship of Audrey Tautou for Mood Indigo. He also speaks about his creative decisions behind Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?, and why animation was the necessary format for Noam Chomsky: “It was […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Dec 13, 2013 -
Michel Gondry on Old-School Animation, His Trademark Whimsy, and Plumbing the Mind of Noam Chomsky for Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
Two highly unique minds converge in Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, the latest from whimsical visionary Michel Gondry, who aptly subtitles his film, “An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky.” In the works for four years, this self-explanatory project from the artist behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dave Chapelle’s Block Party, and a veritable library of music videos is a charming and markedly low-tech doc that literally illustrates the insights of Chomsky, one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Ever-fascinated by the depths of the human brain, and ever-faithful in dressing his films with cartoon-like touches, […]
by R. Kurt Osenlund on Nov 21, 2013 -
Independent Film Week: 3 Films I Can’t Stop Thinking About, Part 1
The first rule of Film Week is that if you have time to blog during Film Week, you’re probably not doing it right. The second rule of Film Week is that if you attend, the best part is that you will meet all kinds of awesome people making awesome films. This may intimidate you. It’s okay. Be cool. I guess that’s the third rule of Film Week, bro: just be cool. When the good folks at Filmmaker Magazine asked me to blog about Film Week again this year, I knew I wanted to write about some of the awesome people […]
by Penny Lane on Sep 24, 2012 -
INTRODUCING “THE GREEN HORNET”
I’m not sure I see the Michel Gondry in this trailer for his The Green Hornet. On the other hand, as this interview with Gondry, Seth Rogen and producer Neil Moritz at Ain’t It Cool News points out, the trailer is intended for newcomers to the comic and doesn’t get into the intricacies of the film or some of its more innovative visual elements. I’m not a fan of the comics but am a big Gondry fan. What do you think?
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 22, 2010 -
Leos Carax And Michel Gondry, Tokyo !
DENIS LAVANT IN “MERDE,”DIRECTOR LEOS CARAX’SEGMENT OF TOKYO!. COURTESY LIBERATION ENTERTAINMENT. French directors Leos Carax and Michel Gondry – both born in the early 1960s, during the first blush of the Nouvelle Vague – so far have had markedly different career paths. Carax, a boy from the Parisian suburbs, became a film critic and short film director before announcing himself as a major talent with his first two features, Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Bad Blood (1986). Carax’s distinctive visual style, outsider sensibility and preoccupation with modern romance was also on show in his third film, Lovers on the Bridge […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 6, 2009
